by Sara Blaedel
“What do you know about the body?” Louise asked.
“We don’t know a damn thing as long as this old woman prevents us from doing our job!”
“We’re on our way.”
* * *
Camilla sat staring out the kitchen window. Her hands held a cup of coffee, while her thoughts were out in the forest with the boy who wouldn’t come home.
Besides everywhere else in her body that hurt, she had a crick in her neck because Frederik had let her sleep on the sofa all night. When he’d come in to say good morning, she quickly gulped all the pills he handed her. He told her about the corpse Eik’s dog had found out by the girls’ graves. She’d been very annoyed that he hadn’t woken her up so she could go along, but he dismissed her by saying that no one had really known what was out there, and anyway, she’d needed sleep.
She turned when she heard Louise’s footsteps on the stairs. She assumed that her friend and Eik had slept together, and she was expecting her to be radiant, but Camilla’s smile disappeared when Louise walked in the room. She looked harried, with dark rings under her eyes.
“What’s going on?” Camilla asked. She groaned when she stood to get another cup. “You could have woken me up. I’d like to have gone out there with you.”
“Can you get hold of your manager?” Louise said. “The police are out there, and they want to inspect the site, but Elinor has planted herself on one of the old graves and refuses to move. The police want someone to take her away.”
“What the hell is she doing out there?” Camilla said. “And what happened yesterday?”
Louise shrugged. “The dogs ran around, and before we knew what they were up to, Charlie had dug down and found a hand.”
“Christ! What is the deal with this place? If I’d known there were hit-and-run drivers, Vikings, ghosts, and double graves, Frederik would have had to move in with me, back in the city.”
“We don’t know if it is a double grave,” Louise said. “We really don’t know very much yet, only that there are bones that shouldn’t be there.”
Eik walked up behind her with a bad case of morning hair, heading for the Nespresso machine. “We have time for a cup?”
“Only if you bring it along,” Louise said. She was halfway to the hall to put on her shoes.
“I’m going with you,” Camilla yelled. She’d called Tønnesen, but he hadn’t answered. “I’ll take care of Elinor.”
She looked out into the yard. Dina lay stretched out under a tree. Charlie trotted around with his nose to the ground, tail wagging. “Should we shut them in, or do you want to take them along?”
“Nymand’s team will have their own dogs out there, so it’s probably best that ours stay here,” Louise said. She looked over at Eik.
“Sure.” He called the two dogs in. “You don’t let an old circus horse smell the sawdust if you’re not going to let him dance.”
22
Elinor looked like a tiny pawn on an enormous chessboard. She leaned on her cane, a bowed old woman standing on the grave as if someone had nailed her to it.
“Hi, Elinor,” Camilla called out.
Morning dew still covered the grass in the forest meadow. The graves were ringed with dark gravel all the way around. They had probably been well cared for at one time, she thought, but now bushes had overtaken several of them. The low hedge from long ago, probably a windbreak, had grown out of shape, and long tufts of grass had sprouted up on the graves themselves. The entire area had been neglected and was fast returning to nature.
“The police need her out of the way,” Louise repeated.
She walked over to join Nymand and his crime scene technicians. They had carefully dug down beside the body, and now they were pushing a plate in underneath to lift it out. The corpse and the earth around it would be taken in for examination.
Shadows from the treetops danced on the earth in front of Camilla’s feet; ground mist rose from a small hollow at the edge of the forest, just beyond the old gnarled tree. She shivered in the cool morning breeze.
“The wagons are rolling on the Death Trail,” the old woman mumbled.
“How is she in the way?” Camilla asked the dog handler, who stood a few meters away. “When you’re focused on the graves over there.”
“You have to get her to move so we can do our job,” was all he said. He stared openly at her black-and-blue face.
Elinor kept mumbling. Camilla held a hand out to her, but she ignored it. Camilla lowered her hand and stepped back. The earth was dark where the old woman stood; there was no green grass. It looked as if someone had been digging around.
“Listen, goddamn it, she’s not doing this just to bother you,” Camilla said. She hobbled over to the policeman. “Instead of standing there looking like an old grouch, you could walk over to her and take a look. The dirt’s different from the other graves.”
“Yeah, maybe! Except it’s hard to see as long as she’s standing on it.”
Camilla looked around for Nymand.
Elinor stirred. Hunched over, looking down at the ground, she turned and walked away from the grave. Camilla followed her. Now she was convinced that Elinor only wanted to point out the grave to her. Once she was sure that Camilla understood, she moved away.
Camilla hurried to follow the old lady. It wasn’t just the morning chill bringing out goose bumps on her skin; she had a vague feeling that something was about to happen. Something not at all nice.
Elinor strode past two gravestones and stopped beside the third. The grave looked like all the others, the same gray, simple stone plate set slightly crooked in the ground. Camilla crouched down and was about to read when a man’s voice boomed from behind and startled her.
“Got something over here!” said a tall, husky policeman. Camilla noticed that the dog handler had straightened up, now that his dog showed interest where Elinor had stood. Nymand and his men rushed over.
“What’s happening?” she yelled. She put a hand on Elinor’s arm. “I’m going back to see what this is all about.”
But as she was about to turn, Elinor grabbed her. “The wagons are rolling on the Death Trail.”
Technicians in a blue van backed up to the grave where Elinor had been standing. Two men in white coveralls carefully began scraping the earth away.
“Positive!” someone yelled.
Camilla was rushing toward them when suddenly she felt a strong hand on the back of her shoulder. “Stay here!” a policeman said.
“What’s going on? And take your hand off me!” She squirmed.
“It looks like they found another body,” he said, letting go of her.
“You mean, a body buried there where Elinor was?”
“It looks that way.”
Camilla froze a second before whirling toward Elinor, her feet planted on the grave behind them. Their eyes met, then the old woman turned and walked toward the forest.
Camilla called her name. She wanted to run after her, but the pain in her legs and the husky policeman stopped her. “What’s that old witch up to?” He stared after her.
Camilla slumped. She looked at the grave the old woman had just left. She heard the dog handler praising his dog, the dog snapping at the snack the man had tossed at him. She sensed the stillness of the forest, though everything around her was in motion. It was as if she were in the middle of a movie set where a mass grave was being uncovered right before her eyes.
“I think there’s another grave here you should look at,” she said, pointing.
“Nymand!” the policeman called out across the clearing.
Camilla couldn’t move when the officer asked the dog handler to check the grave she’d singled out. She felt she knew what she was about to see.
Her eyes followed the policeman and his dog in slow motion. They stopped at the grave. The dog sniffed around, but it made no noise when it looked up at its handler. He said something to the officer beside Camilla; she couldn’t hear what, could only see his mouth moving. She loo
ked back down at the grave.
“Negative,” the officer said.
She grabbed him before he walked away. “There is something. Or else she wouldn’t have shown us the grave.” She ignored his remark that crime scenes always attract weirdos trying to draw attention to themselves. “She was right a few minutes ago,” Camilla said, pointing to the first grave, which several of the technicians huddled around. The mood was tense. They worked fast, focusing on what was being dug up while speaking in low voices.
Louise came over to her. “It’s a young woman. It looks like she’s been in the ground only a short time. She probably won’t be difficult to identify, if we can find a missing person matching her description.”
“How could this happen?” Camilla whispered. Her chest felt tight; even though she had covered many cases while on the crime desk at Morgenavisen, she had never gotten used to the sight of a corpse. “Why are all these bodies showing up here?”
She had to sit down. Her scalp tingled as the blood drained out of her cheeks.
Louise shook her head. She had no answer.
“You have to check the last grave Elinor showed me,” Camilla said. She looked up at her friend. “The dog may not have smelled anything, but I’m sure there’s something. It’s obvious she wanted us to look there.”
“My guess is that the entire area will be cordoned off. Nymand will call in an archaeologist with knowledge of disturbed sites, who can tell us where someone has been digging recently.” Louise started to walk back to the others.
Camilla followed her. “Who could she be, that woman you just found?”
“It’s hard to say. She’s young, probably early twenties.”
“What’s she look like?”
“Thin, almost naked, long blond hair,” Louise said. “A tattoo around one wrist, another one down by her hip. I couldn’t see what it was.”
Camilla stayed in the background as Louise approached the technician and pointed out the final grave Elinor had stood at.
“Can you see how the young woman died?” Camilla asked when Louise returned. But at that moment Nymand ordered everyone to leave.
“We don’t want anyone tramping around here until we’ve secured the entire area,” he yelled. He looked at Camilla.
Several times over the years in her work as a journalist, she’d gone through unsolved cases. She could remember several of them, but none involving the murder of a woman in the Roskilde area.
“This is going to take some time,” Louise said. She put her arm around Camilla’s shoulder when she began to sway. “Nymand is calling everything to a halt until an archaeologist looks at the site. He’ll also look at the last grave Elinor pointed out to you. If there’s been any digging there, the vegetation will probably show it.”
A policeman came over and asked Camilla to leave. “We’re securing the entire area,” he said. He nodded toward the forest, as if he expected her to run right in there.
“We’re parked over there,” Camilla said. She pointed at the other side of the gnarled tree.
“Then you’ll have to walk around,” he said, and he began pushing her.
She’d had enough. She was freezing, her leg hurt, and the whole scene in front of her was surreal. The last thing she wanted to hear was a young officer with a shaved head ordering her around.
“Get your hands off me! This is my forest!”
“That may be, but right now it’s a crime scene. So I’m going to have to ask you to leave the area.”
There were probably a thousand things she could have snapped back at him, but instead she sighed and gave up. She just wanted to go home and lie down.
“Eik and I are heading back to town,” Louise said, as she followed her to the car. “We’re going into the station to check the national missing person files.”
23
They found her. They found her! Sune felt as if he were about to explode.
The last few days he had watched the police cars from his hiding place; he’d heard their dogs, listened to them yelling. They had dug all over, and the earth from several of the old orphanage graves lay in uneven, coal-black mounds.
He’d stood hidden among the trees as two men in white coveralls unfolded a body bag. Even at a distance, he recognized her long, blond hair when they laid her in and zipped it up. They’d carried her back to the car with the tinted windows.
Now the police were finally gone, and he scampered back across the forest floor, away from the clearing and the dug-up graves. His heart hammered, and he felt dizzy from blood rushing through his temples. He’d been right all along. Deep inside he had hoped that he’d imagined it all, that he had been scared for no reason. But he’d seen her in the light of the bonfire, lying on the ground, so still.
The moon’s pale light cast ghostly shadows around Sune, but he wasn’t afraid of trees or dark forests. Nothing in nature unsettled him. It was all the other things.
He stopped to catch his breath, but he whirled around when he heard limbs cracking behind him, then the sound of heavy footsteps. He hadn’t been paying attention, and he was about to run when he recognized his father’s voice in the darkness.
“Wait! You have to listen to me. Your mother wants to see you!”
Thoughts flew through his head. His desperate flight. Punishment, the oath ring. His legs wanted to run, but his craving to see his mother stopped them. His heart beat so loudly that it would have scared the forest birds away if they hadn’t already gone to roost. Now he and his father were alone.
“Sune.” His father approached him with open arms; it felt like a magnet to Sune, yet he kept his distance. His father’s arms sank.
“The police came by asking about you. I had a tough time figuring out what to say. People think you’ve taken your life. They’re talking about you.”
Sune didn’t know what to say, either. He wanted this to end. His father seemed completely different from the night he had hissed in Sune’s ear to pull himself together; to not shame him.
“Your mother’s doing badly, and she’s terribly upset. Come home for her sake, and we can work everything else out. You’re a grown boy now—you have responsibilities.”
“I’m not coming home,” he whispered, unable to control his voice.
“You have to. I can’t take care of you out here.”
“I can take care of myself,” Sune said, more self-assured now.
“Not anymore you can’t. It’s too dangerous. Come home with me, and swear on the oath ring. You’re born into this; there’s nothing to do about it.”
For a moment they stood in the clear moonlight, staring at each other. Then Sune shook his head; he realized what his father was after, and it had nothing to do with his mom.
“I’m trying to help you. You’re one of us; we’ll take care of you.”
Sune could almost see the bonds of the Asatro his father wanted to bind him with. They tightened, cutting into him, snarling like the worm that wrapped itself around Midgård and bit its own tail. But then his father’s shoulders seemed to sink again as his expression loosened. He sighed.
“Don’t decide right now. Why don’t I come back tomorrow? But I have to tell you that if you still say no, you’re on your own. Completely. Like a child who hasn’t been knee-sat.”
Sune understood what that meant. A baby who hasn’t been knee-sat belongs to no one. It could be abandoned to the wolves if the parents felt unable to take care of it. Sune had been knee-sat at the ceremony where he was given his name and his parents had officially accepted him. He’d been very young back then; he didn’t remember. But no one had told him that the acceptance could be revoked.
“Tomorrow evening after sunset at the sacrificial oak,” his father said. “I’m holding the door open for you, but if you don’t come in I can’t protect you any longer.”
He turned and left.
24
Have you moved your unit out of the station, or what?” Olle asked when Louise met him in the hall Monday morning.
“Rønholt talked about it at the morning briefing,” Olle said. “He said they found three double graves and to expect that they’d need our help. We might have to contact Interpol and search their database for wanted persons.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Louise said. “Nymand is twisting arms and the pathologists are going to examine all three corpses this morning. As soon as we have the teeth, we’ll start working on identification. There’s more to go on with the most recent corpse; she had two tattoos and we’ve got the photographs. I’ll gather everything up and bring it to the briefing.”
She smiled at her colleague and hurried down the hall to the Rathole.
“I’m guessing you’d rather drink your own tea,” Eik said when he came in five minutes later. He set a tray down on his desk and pushed a plate with two rolls over to her.
Louise was surprised by the mountain of sandwiches on his plate. Two slices of bread with cheese and four liver pâté sandwiches.
“Looks like the fresh country air gave you an appetite,” she said. But when he began scraping off the pickles and aspic from the four sandwiches, she realized what was going on.
“You’re not. You’re not feeding him that!” She looked down at the German shepherd, who was staring up at the source of all that aroma. “He’ll fart all day and drive us out of the room.”
“Take it easy. I’ll go over to Netto later and buy dog food,” Eik promised. He set the plate down on the floor.
Louise sighed. She knew who would have to stop by the vet and pick up some decent food for Charlie. But before she could say anything more, Olle knocked on the door and stuck his head in. He eyed the dog nervously.
“Take a look at these photos.” He held out a folder. “It’s a twenty-four-year-old woman from Tårnby. Her sister reported her missing about three weeks ago. She has a little boy; she disappeared the night before his third birthday. And she has two tattoos.”